What is "citation"

Citation \Ci*ta"tion\, n. [F. citation, LL. citatio, fr.L. citare to cite. See Cite]

1. An official summons or notice given to a person to appear; the paper containing such summons or notice.

2. The act of citing a passage from a book, or from another person, in his own words; also, the passage or words quoted; quotation.

   This horse load of citations and fathers.
   --Milton.

3. Enumeration; mention; as, a citation of facts.

4. (Law) A reference to decided cases, or books of authority, to prove a point in law.

c.1300, "summons, written notice to appear," from Old French citation or directly from Latin citationem (nominative citatio) "a command," noun of action from past participle stem of citare "to summon, urge, call; put in sudden motion, call forward; rouse, excite" (see cite). Meaning "passage cited, quotation" is from 1540s. From 1918 as "a mention in an official dispatch."

n. 1 An official summons or notice given to a person to appear; the paper containing such summons or notice. 2 The act of cite a passage from a book, or from another person, in his own words. 3 An entry in a list of source(s) from which one took information, words or literary or verbal context. 4 The passage or words quoted; quotation. 5 enumeration; mention; as, a citation of facts. 6 A reference to decided cases, or books of authority, to prove a point in law. 7 A commendation in recognition of some achievement, or a formal statement of an achievement.

1. n. an official award (as for bravery or service) usually given as formal public statement [syn: commendation]

2. (law) the act of citing (as of spoken words or written passages or legal precedents etc.)

3. a short note recognizing a source of information or of a quoted passage; "the student's essay failed to list several important citations"; "the acknowledgments are usually printed at the front of a book"; "the article includes mention of similar clinical cases" [syn: acknowledgment, credit, reference, mention, quotation]

4. a passage or expression that is quoted or cited [syn: quotation, quote]

5. a summons that commands the appearance of a party at a proceeding

6. thoroughbred that won the triple crown in 1948

Citation (April 11, 1945 – August 8, 1970) was the eighth American Triple Crown winner, and one of three major North American Thoroughbreds (along with Zenyatta and Cigar) to win at least 16 consecutive races in major stakes race competition. He was the first horse in history to win one million dollars.

A citation is a credit or reference to another document or source.

Citation may also refer to:

Citation is the 4th album recorded by alternative country musician Scott Miller. It was released on March 24, 2006.

Broadly, a citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source (not always the original source). More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of acknowledging the relevance of the works of others to the topic of discussion at the spot where the citation appears. Generally the combination of both the in-body citation and the bibliographic entry constitutes what is commonly thought of as a citation (whereas bibliographic entries by themselves are not). References to single, machine-readable assertions in electronic scientific articles are known as nanopublications, a form of microattribution.

Citations have several important purposes: to uphold intellectual honesty (or avoiding plagiarism), to attribute prior or unoriginal work and ideas to the correct sources, to allow the reader to determine independently whether the referenced material supports the author's argument in the claimed way, and to help the reader gauge the strength and validity of the material the author has used. As one article has argued, citations relate to the way authors perceive the substance of their work, their position in the academic system, and the moral equivalency of their place, substance, and words.

The forms of citations generally subscribe to one of the generally accepted citations systems, such as the Oxford, Harvard, MLA, American Sociological Association (ASA), American Psychological Association (APA), and other citations systems, as their syntactic conventions are widely known and easily interpreted by readers. Each of these citation systems has its respective advantages and disadvantages relative to the trade-offs of being informative (but not too disruptive) and thus are chosen relative to the needs of the type of publication being crafted. Editors often specify the citation system to use.

Bibliographies, and other list-like compilations of references, are generally not considered citations because they do not fulfill the true spirit of the term: deliberate acknowledgement by other authors of the priority of one's ideas.